Don't people trade in commodities though? Corn and soy and other things fluctuate in price because of their utility and changes in supply and demand, no?
(interesting aside, the best heuristic i ever learned on how to get good vodka, look up the manufactures headquarters/operations location on google maps, and if you don't see grain silos, don't buy the vodka)
Who needs bitcoin? Honestly not many people right now. The speculative boom is that, in the future, it becomes internet-cash. Then people will need it, they'll want it a lot to buy things in the internet, and that's fine. If they do, then the value will go up.
However, aside from the fact that bitcoin is absolutely not able to handle cash-like transactions at all, there is still no reason for normal people to speculate on it now. If it becomes the de facto internet cash of the future, then, cool, you just exchange for it in the future.
The idea that anyone could ever anticipate the future demand of a trivially replaceable ledger of exchange is... honestly insane. I'm not saying it's not worth speculating on, but please, god, don't put any serious portion of your investment portfolio in those types of arbitrary bets!
Worldwide, lots of people.
There's folks in Venezuela and Zimbabwe who need Bitcoin because their national currencies are hyperinflating.
There's folks in El Salvador who need Bitcoin because it is their national currency.
There's folks fleeing Ukraine who need Bitcoin because their nation is at risk of being swallowed by a large empire.
There's folks in Russia who need Bitcoin because their nation is doing the swallowing and getting cut off from the world financial system as a result.
There's folks in China (and other countries) who need Bitcoin because their nation can't be trusted not to interfere with private property and it's good to have a little insurance policy on a thumb drive, piece of paper, or memorized.
I think that cryptocurrency is one of those areas where people in the developed world look at their own life experience and think "Who could ever need that?", not realizing that they represent a tiny fraction of humanity and that the experience of most of the rest of the world is dramatically different. I work on a product (Android) with about 3B users. I work on a tiny segment of it (tablets & TVs), with about 12% market share combined, and we're always struggling to get the larger org to invest in developing us. But when you run the numbers, you realize that the 12% of Android users with a tablet or TV is about 340M, more than the entire population of the United States. Similarly, the number of mobile phone users with accessibility needs (largely vision difficulties) is also larger than the population of the United States, yet it's awfully hard to get people to consider screen readers and assistive technologies when developing.
Americans in general are wildly unaware of what a tiny percentage of humanity they are (for reference: about 4%), and this comes up over and over again in HN threads.
I'm not saying bitcoin is going to zero. In these threads, i've always said bitcoin has perfectly reasonable use cases, but if we're being honest not many people really need to use bitcoin, and yes, i'm saying, in the the grand scheme of things, the population of El Salvador is not many people. It will probably not become the de facto unit of exchange in our lifetime, or ever.
I'm not talking about bitcoin is a vehicle for temporarily transferring wealth from one asset to another, i actually think it's pretty useful for that, i'm talking about bitcoin as a vehicle for investment... which is why the lion's share of people have been buying it in the last decade.
Maybe China?
Certainly Venezuela, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, and other countries around the globe already use USD as a de facto currency. Heck, in Zimbabwe and El Salvador it's de jure as well!
To be fair, China is a big chunk of the global population already. But crypto enthusiasts are wildly unaware of what little use it actually has. It comes up over and over again in HN threads and on Twitter.
It's true that people here need either an alternative currency for purchasing foreign goods (access to USD or other currencies is restricted, and customs fees are insane), or an alternative asset for keeping the value of their savings.
But it's not true that people need Bitcoin. As a currency for purchasing things, Bitcoin is useless. People here are better off evading customs taxes (smuggling), and purchasing via USDs bought on the black market. And for keeping the value of their savings, again, people usually turn to USDs. Some people have speculated with BTC and other cryptocurrencies, yeah, but this is not so much for savings, but more for greedy speculation.
And it's not like the USD is important on itself, it's just an intermediate goal for something else. If the USD becomes too unstable or loses much of its value, people here will turn to other stronger foreign currencies.
So, imagine what this means in the context of what your parent comment said: that Bitcoin's ledger being trivially replaceable.
No, Bitcoin is not needed here. Not at the moment at least. And if it is in the future, so be it, but so can be any other crypto or alternative currency. Who can predict which it will be (if any)? I don't see how betting on future Bitcoin's value for countries like mine makes any sense when there nothing inherent about Bitcoin that would make more valuable than any other alternative currency.
The Ukrainian Hryvni is only down about 10% since the war started. The Ruble is actually up 10% (these are all quotes on open markets, not ones controlled by governments)
Bitcoin is down more than 30% in that time. It has a short history with incredible volatility and is very illiquid in a bad situation.
Government currencies aren’t the best when controlled by tyrants, bur crypto isn’t ready for global adoption yet. Would you park your GTFO money in a commodity that can be destroyed by an Elon Musk tweet?
Some years ago I updated the Wikipedia article on Skyy vodka, which read like a press release, by putting in actual facts. Such as that the ethanol came from a industrial ethanol plant in Pekin, Illinois which also made ethanol for fuel use. Then it was shipped by rail, in tank cars, to a company in California which mostly makes low-end booze, but also will make a custom brand for you if you pay them. The water used is tap water run through a reverse-osmosis plant. A little bit of re-distillation for polishing, some mixing, some flavoring, and it's piped into the bottling line. The outsourcing company makes about a thousand different brands, but, as they admit in interviews, there are only about hundred different recipes. Skyy itself was purely a marketing company - everything was outsourced. Eventually they were acquired by a real manufacturer, so they found an exit.
So it was a meme brand. But a real product. Now we have meme brands with nothing behind them.
Looking at you, Bored Ape Yacht Club / Otherside / Yuga.